


Mirrors

by sheafrotherdon



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-11
Updated: 2005-12-11
Packaged: 2017-10-11 23:26:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/118325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheafrotherdon/pseuds/sheafrotherdon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Seven scenes, seven years, seven reflections of Draco Malfoy</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mirrors

His father's late, so Draco sits beside his mother as she dresses for dinner and doesn't fear the intruding snap of Lucius' voice. It fascinates as well as terrifies him, the way his father can clip the wings from the most innocent of words, press his disapproval against Draco's throat like a wand, a knife, a thumb against his windpipe to remind him of duty.

Draco swings his feet from the elegant stool. His legs are long, although not long enough to reach the floor (thirty-nine months long – he counted the blocks of time with his tutor the day before last, pressing his fingers to parchment as if he might grow more quickly clever through the simple magic of deliberate touch). His mother smiles and reaches across the dressing table with a rustle of silk. She smells of good things – lavender (cool hands against his forehead when he's sick) beeswax (a brand new candle to keep away the boggarts), soft-scented creams that remind him of morning ( _We are not raising a girl, Narcissa. A boy has no place in this room, among these powders and potions, these tricks and fancies of your . . . feminine sex_ ). He rubs his mother's skirts between his fingers and thinks of the five plum bruises he glimpsed as she dressed. They looked like fingerprints against her arm.

"Are you bored, _mon petit_?" Narcissa asks, and he shakes his head, but she hands him her mirror as a plaything regardless, gilt-edged and heavy with the obligations of lineage. She pins an errant curl and he stares at his reflection – grey-eyes, pale skin; the visage of an heir. He straightens his shoulders and smiles at her in the oval looking glass that hangs on the wall.

"You're pretty," he says, fingers wound tight in her skirts. "Father will be proud."

  
~*~

It's his father's wish he attend the New Year's ball – an order spoken over breakfast. Draco glances at his mother, watches a flicker of disquiet cross her face before she turns her attention back to the grapefruit on her plate. She swallows a portion of the bitter fruit before her, then turns to the house elves, dispatches one to owl a tailor and another to light the lamps in her study. For three and a half months the ball has been her greatest preoccupation – accommodations to arrange; music, flowers, food and drink. Draco often plays quietly in her study as she works, sharing the pastries the House Elves bring with her morning coffee. He knows – with every ounce of understanding his seven years can supply - that his presence at the ball will alter the plans she's put in place. The attendance of an heir is no insignificant thing.

Draco reaches for the crystal goblet that contains his morning pumpkin juice and turns the glass between his fingers. If he tilts his glass to the left he can capture his mother's countenance in the goblet – small, reduced, a beautiful but trammelled thing. If he turns his glass to the right his father's face looms, his presence pressing at the edge of every reflective surface of the crystal cup. A half-inch turn again and Draco's own face appears, caught between his mother's fading smile and his father's consuming claim. He looks up and wonders at the tenderness on his mother's face before she excuses herself, leaving him alone with his father.

Nothing is said directly, but Draco understands that he will no longer be spending his mornings playing in his mother's study. He straightens his spine and sets his shoulders in a conscious imitation of his father's posture. "What shall we do today, father?" he asks, and is rewarded with a small, tight smile.

~*~

Waiting impatiently for the bumbling old witch to finish pinning his robes, Draco amuses himself by studying the tableau reflected in the dressmaker's mirror. The picture there is almost laughably perfect - he stands on a pedestal, elevated above the fussing witch who's crawling around his feet in menial supplication. It's all he can do not to snigger up his sleeve.

There's a month to go before he leaves for Hogwarts, and he's impatient for September to arrive. All summer he's chafed at his father's steadying hand – at Hogwarts _he_ will give the orders, issue directives, manage the affairs of other students. He daily considers the tally of possible classmates – Crabbe and Goyle have no thought in their head but to acquiesce to his wishes, much as their fathers toady to his own. It's an odd ambition, but an ambition all the same, and he's confident they'll end up in Slytherin. Pansy Parkinson is surely a peer, and Theodore Nott . . . Draco pauses, examining the weave of his robes, suddenly suspicious he's spotted an imperfection. He flicks at the fabric with an idle hand and removes a piece of lint before letting his thoughts drift back to where they started. Nott might plunge his family into eternal shame by being sorted Ravenclaw, he thinks. The boy always did seem too smart for his own good, and rather taller than was strictly polite.

He sighs as the witch works steadily around the hem of his robes. His family will not linger in Diagon Alley today, not with the streets full of plebeian witches and odious Mudbloods. There are probably any number of infamous Weasleys out there, buying second-hand cauldrons and dog-eared textbooks with money made from selling eggs. He's never met a Weasley, but the stories he's heard are surely too plentiful to be untrue.

He wonders whom else he'll meet at Hogwarts, which other students will fill each house. He's lost in thought when the gentle tinkle of the bell above the shop door sounds, and a scrawny boy in ill-fitting clothes is ushered to stand beside him.

"Hello," Draco says. "Hogwarts too?"

~*~

As Draco expects, Narcissa makes her excuses and leaves the Minister of Magic's box long before Krum closes a capable hand around the Snitch. Lucius, too, melts into the night once the trophies have been bestowed, and Draco is left to navigate his own path between the boorish displays of Irish exuberance that spill across the campgrounds. He walks swiftly, wrinkling his nose at the smell of amateurish cooking, stale alcohol, and too-close bodies. He finds himself marginally thankful to be dressed like a Muggle, saved from the task of whipping his robes from contact with children and sparking campfires.

The forest looms, a welcome oasis of relative solitude – an excellent vantage point, he thinks, from which to watch the fledgling and long-neglected assertion of _right_. He breathes in his father's certainty, recalls with begrudging admiration every silence, every recent pause in conversation with which his father has effectively communicated intent. He smirks to consider the Muggle-lovers and half-breeds who stumble beyond the tree line, mired in the ignorant belief that a Quidditch match represents all that could be memorable about this weekend.

Screams rouse him from his reverie, and surround him as the sky lights up with slick, green menace. Turning his face toward the obliterated stars, Draco is suddenly aware of the pressure of bone against muscle; the cavity of his eye sockets, the hinge of his jaw, the sharpened slant of skull beneath skin. He closes his eyes to better feel the portent press of light upon his face – the skeletal levelling of rank and age until he's nothing, everything, instrument and cause. He reflects the Mark; the Mark reflects him.

It's begun - and ambition is a sleeping serpent curled against his palm.

~*~

Doubt has a taste, he discovers - tinny and repellent at the back of his tongue ( _cheap_ , his brain supplies). He curls the fingers of one hand around the dirt-slick railing that runs the ferry's circumference, steadying himself against the roll and pitch of the North Sea's swell. The ocean seems almost irritable, as if there's an animate force beneath the crest of each wave, disgusted to find itself complicit in carrying a gaggle of passengers toward the fortress it guards.

The Muggles have woven stories about Azkaban – created myths and legends about the ruins that jut from the ocean like a vicious, grasping hand. Draco heard the whispers as they passed through the village - _ghosts and ghouls out there, sir, the souls of the damned. You and your mother, you'd do better by Skye if it's sights you're set on seeing._ He'd nodded his understanding and been left alone – finds himself begrudgingly grateful that Muggles recognize breeding and power even if they do not grasp the meaning of magic. He takes comfort in their superstitious deference – fishing boats avoid the island lest mer-folk pull nets and souls to the ocean's floor - a better ward for Azkaban than all the Ministry's glamours and spells. There is only a single vessel that will risk the crossing – a sight-seeing ferry, piloted by a sullen Squib. The sign outside his shack asks two Muggle pounds from anyone who would travel on his boat. It's galleons that pass from hand to hand before the voyage begins.

The ferry presses into the gloom of half-past morning and Draco sneers at the sky, at the inconvenience of submitting to this ridiculous means of conveyance. He shifts his feet, seized by a piercing hatred for the impotence of his bruised conviction, for the disdain that's now the best he can muster. He searches for the fury that consumed him in the first days after his father was taken, when he'd sought out Potter and heard the seductive whisper of a different Unforgivable beneath every waking breath. But what anger he felt has dissipated into disquiet. His father is jailed, his name sullied, and all in the service of a Lordly master who cannot pluck a fifteen-year-old boy from his path.

Draco glances at the waves to catch a glimpse of himself, but beneath the morning's canopy of racing clouds the sea reflects nothing but slate-grey sky. He looks to the horizon, tightens his hand against the rail, and welcomes the repulsive slide of salt-watered metal beneath his palm.

He has, he realizes with sickening resignation, come unmoored.

~*~

He finds sanctuary in a little-used bathroom; neglected space where his mask can slip. In classrooms, corridors, common rooms, halls, he's mindful of the lessons his father taught him – arch of eyebrow, tilt of chin, barest smile of toleration. With his feet new-planted on splintered tile and his hands curled tight around battered porcelain, he bows his head, drowns in uncertainty.

It's become routine, this dread apprehension that spills as tears, this loathing that claws in the pit of his stomach. He raises his head, forces himself to contemplate his reflection. His father is there, skin and bone, but the protection offered by resemblance is long since spent. His eyes are Black, grey with belonging, but family is no strength when pitted against a Dark Lord who kills for sport, in anger, to exact a father's debt from a son.

Myrtle asks questions, and he replies with an honesty that sickens him. He longs for the first frost of familiar contempt, the slow-iced edge of barest acknowledgement with which to wound this long-dead girl. But his words barely recognize the power of his summoning, and the few that reach his tongue are wretched and dull. His sarcasm falters, entitlement fractured by the strength of his fear, and he cannot be what the mirror reflects. No pure-blood would cower before the strictures of a Mudblood's command; no son of Salazar would covet the courage of Godric's children.

When he glimpses Potter he stiffens with humiliation, wonders for a second if his own hateful wishing conjured the boy. He fumbles for his wand, spits out a curse and welcomes the clean-hewn fury that surges through his body. "Cruci –" he hisses, but the word is snatched from his tongue. His breath snags and tears on the edge of pain so clean he cannot speak - he lies on the floor with no memory of having fallen, touches a hand to his chest and feels blood spill an apology between his fingers.

Potter's face looms over him, and Draco sees his injuries in the sickened shock of the other boy's expression. It's with curious detachment - his mind a world away from the desperate struggle to clear his vision and claw air into his lungs - that he studies Potter's face. This, then, is what it looks like to have done the Dark Lord's bidding.

He falls asleep that night - confusion ground like dirt beneath his fingernails, body bound together by duty's bitter magic – and dreams of a shroud, red-gold with defeat.

He wakes in the infirmary. He did not die.

~*~

He'd imagined, as a child, that battle would be different. Crouching inside the frigid crevice that Potter stubbornly insists on calling a cave, he has time to contemplate the absurdity of his expectations. Snared by the persuasive fervour of his father's rhetoric, the visions of warfare he'd conjured for himself had been Merlin's battles; squires' tents and snapping standards, hounds called to heel. His own naiveté makes the stale bread in his stomach twist and curl, and he swallows hard against losing the first food he's eaten in two days.

They're filthy and cold, and the muscles in his wand-arm cramp and seize as he waits, poised to steal out from the feeble shelter of this Pict-scarred rock. He can hear the whisper of Dementors, and he glances at Potter, imagines the other boy searching through memory to find a single moment that might act as a shield, defend against the hiss of a monster's breath.

Draco claims no safety for himself. His friends wear masks and practice curses beneath their breath, and all the mercy he hopes for is to be cut down by a curling blast of violent green light before he can be Kissed.

Potter tenses and Draco looks out to the barren landscape before them, to the boulders and spell-scarred trees that testify to war. It's four days since Snape was killed, and beyond the thatch of gorse that blooms in the distance, the ground is stained with costly blood.

"It's time," Potter whispers.

Draco's hand snakes out to grasp Potter's wrist in the split-second before the other boy can move. "Harry – " he says, and there's no time left to regret the transparency of his voice. He sees his face in Potter's glasses – drawn, watchful, older now.

Potter looks at him and manages a smile. He shifts a little, dislodging Draco's hold on his arm but offering a hand in place of pulse and bone. His fingers are frozen, rough against Draco's own as he squeezes hard. "Yeah," he whispers.

It's time. They loosen hands and step out to meet their reckoning.


End file.
